


Some Worlds Are Better Left Apart

by Pigeonsplotinsecrecy



Series: Conversations [3]
Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Conversations, F/M, Family Dynamics, M/M, TK talks to his mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:35:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29222547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy/pseuds/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy
Summary: A conflicted TK talks to his mom about how he feels about her and Owen starting up their relationship again.
Relationships: Gwyneth Strand/Owen Strand, TK Strand & Gwyneth Strand
Series: Conversations [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1644988
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	Some Worlds Are Better Left Apart

“What’s with you and Dad?” T.K. asks his mom one day when his dad had gone out and it was just him and his mom left at the house. These moments just between the two of them were rare, so he had to take the opportunity when it arose. The relationship between his parents has been bothering him more than he let on, mostly because he thinks it’s going to end up hurting both Owen and Gwyn.

“Why? Did he say something?” She looks up from her lunch, putting her fork down to listen to what he has to say. She’s been less busy lately, so she has more time to stop and talk. Plus, she’s actually in the same time zone now. He likes having his mom around, but having his mom around also complicates things in a way that T.K. isn’t sure how to manage. Mostly, he goes over to his boyfriend’s house. Carlos gave him a key so that he go there whenever his parents are too insufferable. So even when Carlos isn’t home, T.K. has a refuge.

“No,” T.K. shook his head. “But why are you doing this?” He can’t quite fathom it— why his mother has decided that his father deserves a second chance. “What even is the point?” Gwyn had given a lot to the relationship, especially after 9/11 when she had to hold the family together and still try to balance her blossoming career. She’d been the one who had always somehow found time to be there while Owen had devoted more time to his other family of firefighters.

“Are you not okay with your dad and I starting things up again?” Her voice is gentle, and she’s trying to figure out what he’s thinking. Years of family therapy had taught them some skills, even if they didn’t always apply those skills. Owen had missed most of the sessions, but Gwyn had always made the time.

“I don’t know that you’re thinking this through clearly,” T.K. tells her. She thinks that they’re moving too fast, and he thinks it's weird that after so much time they’ve decided that they want to try to go back to old times. He gets that the pandemic has made everything weird, but he never would have expected that it would it this weird. There’s part of him that likes the idea of his parents being together again, but the bigger part of him is already thinking of the end.

“Honey, I know what I’m getting into. I’ve known your dad for a long time. I know exactly how he can be, and I’ve taken that in mind when I made my decision.” Owen is stubborn and riddled with guilt, and with all the emotions that are still so poignant, it’s not just T.K. mom who is going to get hurt, but he’s focusing on her for now. He doesn’t like to think of how Owen might react when things go wrong. He might push away. He might crumble. Owen and T.K. are a lot alike, and T.K. knows how badly he’d react if things went wrong with Carlos, who T.K. has a far less complicated history with. T.K. doesn’t want his mom to go through the heartbreak, but he knows that she’ll survive it because she’s never been able to be the one who breaks down.

“Which means that you should know that he’s going to hurt you, Mom. That’s what he’s always done. Or have you forgotten what he did? What he put us through.” T.K. loves his dad. He’d give his life for him without any questions asked, but he also thinks that his parents getting back together is a stupid, impulsive idea because they’ve never fixed whatever it is that broke them. Their wounds are still open, and while they’ve forgotten about them because they happened so long ago, nothing has really changed. T.K. doesn’t want to go through the turbulence again, and once the honeymoon period is over, he thinks the turbulence will come. He’s an adult now, and he can better handle everything, but they’re still his parents. He worries.

“He’s been through a lot, T.K. I know we had our hard times, but it’s different now. We’re working on being different.”

“How is it different? He left us! I know he was dealing with a lot, and I know that he lost more that day than I can ever imagine, but he left his family when we needed him most.” T.K. can’t talk about this with his dad, so he’s taking it out on the one person who probably could best understand how he felt.

“He never left you,” his Mom tries to console him. “He left me. Our relationship crumbled, but he was always your dad.”

“But he did leave,” T.K. yells because he’s been trying to say this for so long, and his words have always fallen on deaf ears. No one seems to understand that while Owen may have been around after 9/11, he wasn’t serving as a father to T.K., and whether it was fair to Owen or not, T.K. felt abandoned. He always thought, at least in the back of his mind, that Owen didn’t care about him. Owen was either at the firehouse or thinking of the firehouse. He burdened you with a crazy, angry kid who gave you both more grief than you needed.”

“I never felt burdened, T.K. You were going through a hard time like the rest of us were.” It doesn’t make him feel like less of a burden when his parents tell him that he isn’t one. He always thinks that they’re too nice or too guilty to tell the truth about how T.K. had messed up their life.

“The hard time lasted over a decade! I made your life hell, and dad didn’t do anything to help you.” He’d been a menace, finding trouble wherever he could and trying to get his dad to pay attention, but nothing he did could ever be as big as a disaster for Owen as 9/11. He always fears that Owen sees him as a responsibility and not otherwise important.

“He did what he could. I wasn’t perfect either, you know that. I dropped the ball too, and I’m sorry for that.” He doesn’t want apologies. He doesn’t want them to try to wipe the past clean and act like that’s proper atonement. He’s let most of those mistakes go, anyway. The one he holds onto is the refusal to pay attention to what he’s trying to say and what he needs. He feels guilty for these feelings because he knows they never meant to make him feel bad. They weren’t bad parents, but life threw them all off course, and they never found their way back to the path they should be on.

T.K. takes a breath. He levels his tone so that he’s not yelling. “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m not mad at you for not having all the answers. I’m mad at him for not even trying. I’m mad at him for not admitting what he did to his family. Whenever I try to bring it up, he always makes me feel like a fool. He brings up stats of how many people died that day and acts like my feelings make me childish. I _was_ a child, and just because I’ve grown up doesn’t make the hurt go away.”

“We should talk about this with your dad.” Her voice is calm and diplomatic. She didn’t get her name on the door of a big New York law firm without knowing how to keep her calm. Owen knows how to push all her buttons and unsteady her calm, and T.K. still isn’t sure if that’s a good thing. It results in fights, but it also can help Gwyn open up.

“And when we do, we won’t get anywhere because he feels too guilty over what happened to even talk about it with me. He’d rather pretend that none of that bullshit even existed.” After he’s said it, the anger starts to fade, and he just feels exhausted. “I wanted us to be a family again for so long, but this doesn’t change anything. We’re just more civil about our issues now,” and sooner or later, that’s going to blow up into a civil war.

“So, you think this is a bad idea,” his mom confirms, and her voice tells T.K. that he is confirming what she already suspected about her relationship with Owen— that it was a silly mistake and that she should be smarter than to fall for Owen’s charm again.

“I just think that we all need to slow the hell down.” It’s not even that he wants to put a halt to his parents doing whatever they’re doing. They’re adults and they can make their own romantic and sexual decisions, but it’s all been happening too fast for T.K. to process. He tries to tease and joke about the whole thing, but deep down, it all makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to kill his parents’ vibes, but he can’t stand to stay silent anymore.

Gwyneth is quick to piece together a plan. She’s always been good at planning. Those plants don’t always become reality, but she can’t help but try. “We’re going to start by talking to your Dad about how you’re feeling, and then, we’re going to keep open lines of communication. That includes you, T.K. I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep your feelings from us to spare our feelings.”

“I still don’t believe this is going to work.” All he can think is that the whole thing is going to go up in flames, and he’s going to stand between two walls of fire. They’ll want him to choose one or the other. They’ve always had the bad tendency to use T.K. as a mediator. He wants no part of that because he doesn’t have the mental energy to deal with that, and he doesn’t want to regress. He wants to move on with his life and grab the future, which he can’t do if he lets his mind get stuck in the past.

Gwyneth puts a hand on his arm, “And maybe it won’t. Some worlds are better left apart, but if we do this the right way, we’ll know that we did everything we could.” If T.K. ever had to make a similar choice with Carlos, he knows that he would make it. He wouldn’t be able to resist the chance of having such a great love. It wouldn’t matter if he was deluding himself. Sometimes, you just had to try to escape the chance of regret.

T.K. sighs. “I don’t want to be forced to take sides,” and he feels brave saying it because years ago, he never would have created that boundary. Maybe therapy is doing good things for him.

“We won’t make you do that,” and T.K. wants to believe her. He knows that she has the best intention, but the scars of the past remind him of the tug of war that has always happened in the past.

“Even during little fights,” T.K. adds. “They all feel the same.” Every time he is put between them, he feels like a little kid with an impossible decision. He’s torn between his loyalty for his mom who was always there and his dad who he wants to convince to be there.

She purses her lips and nods. “We’ll work on that,” and only time will tell how hard they will work because they’ve got so much shit to sort through, and T.K. can’t figure out how they’re ever going to get through so many years of dysfunction, but the child inside him wants to hope. He wants to believe that a second chance at love is possible. He wants to think their family can be simple— and isn’t that a joke— because no family in the history of families has ever been simple.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I'll be on tumblr @lonestarbabe.


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